Eric Smith on Building a Retail-First Roofing Company in a Storm-Chasing Market

Featuring Eric Smith, co-founder of PAK Exteriors in Englewood, Colorado.

Eric Smith built a roofing company to nearly 10 million dollars and 800 roofs in a single year before he was 25, then sold it because storm revenue wore him out. With PAK Exteriors he is doing the opposite on purpose, building a retail-first company that forecasts as if no hail ever falls. The lesson for any contractor in a storm market is that discipline, not demand, is the thing that compounds.

I sat down with Eric Smith, co-founder of PAK Exteriors, after a mutual friend, Ethan Vande Hey, connected us. Eric is in Englewood, I am in Boulder, so we are practically neighbors, and our origin stories nearly rhyme. He started his first roofing company in college and walked away from his degree to run it. I started a software company in college and stayed in. What pulled me in was that Eric is building PAK in the exact opposite direction of how most Colorado roofers operate, and he has the scars to explain why.

Earn your second act with the lessons from your first

Eric did not learn discipline from a book. He learned it by living through the storm cycle at full throttle. He got into roofing the way a lot of people do, through a stepdad who was knocking doors and making a good living, and he was good at it fast. By 2009 his company, riding a Southlands Mall tornado and a hailstorm in Arvada, did a number that still sounds made up.

"In 2009, we did just under 10 million in revenue, which is like 800-and-something roofs, which is just crazy to think about now."

He credits the run to not knowing any better, and he is honest that the same naivety is back the second time around.

"I think about trying to do 800 roofs now, and I get riddled with anxiety. I'm like, 'How are we gonna do this?'"

When the storms tapered off after 2010, the company had no other engine. They sold. That exit is the whole reason PAK exists, because Eric came back having watched the storm trap from the inside of a public adjusting company, a restoration company, and a year at ABC Supply selling to other roofers.

Treat the storm as a trap, not a windfall

Here is the pattern Eric watched eat contractor after contractor, including his younger self. Every winter, roofers swear they will build something that does not depend on hail. Then a storm hits, and the plan evaporates because the immediate money is impossible to ignore.

"In the winter we would go, 'We're gonna set something up different so that we're not relying on a storm.' And we'd kinda get some stuff in place, and then a storm would hit. And it's like, well, we're not gonna not go do that. And then now your whole year, 18 months is absorbed by making sure you get a piece of the buffet that just opened."

PAK was built to refuse the buffet. The boundary is not a preference, it is written into the forecast.

"We are a retail first company. All of our forecasting, all of our pro forma, everything that we're planning for is built on retail."

That discipline has a real price tag, and Eric says it out loud. He is willing to leave money on the table this year to avoid becoming a storm company again.

"If a storm hits this year, we might be giving up 8 million in revenue to be at four, knowing though that three years from now, we're not gonna be doing this with storms, and we're gonna be built on a foundation of not relying on that."

The low-overhead startup phase is the edge. A small company can decline the buffet because it does not yet carry the cost structure that storm revenue forces you to build and then tear back down.

Chase the complexity nobody else will touch

PAK went west into the Colorado mountains, away from the Front Range where nearly every roofer competes. Part of the reason is personal: Eric's partner, Tyler, grew up in Kremmling after moving from Oklahoma, and his heart is up there. The bigger reason is strategic. Mountain work is all retail, with no hail noise to distract them, and the homes are second, third, and fourth properties owned by people with equity and liquidity.

The mountains are also genuinely hard, which is exactly the point. These are not rinse-and-repeat asphalt jobs. They mix flat, metal, and synthetic composite, and the logistics are brutal. Eric frames the difficulty as the whole strategy.

"Wherever it's hard and wherever there's a little bit of complexity, even just a little bit, it just chokes out your competition and 90% of people don't wanna touch it."

He draws a sharp line between hard-but-known work and hard-but-new work. A Denver insurance claim is hard, but everyone learned it from everyone else.

"When you start to do stuff that no one's done yet, and that's hard, now you're separating yourself and you're putting yourself into a niche in a market where there's not a lot of people there."

I felt this from the sales side years ago. When I sold seamless gutter, a mountain job meant a big check, and I remember white-knuckling a little Chevy Colorado up dirt driveways thinking no box truck could ever follow. Roofing materials are heavier and bulkier than folded metal, so the moat is even deeper.

Get paid now and protect your cashflow like it's the product

The part of retail Eric says he completely missed the first time is cashflow. Insurance margins look great on a spreadsheet and then strangle you while you wait months to collect.

"It's great to make really good margins on an insurance claim on paper, but when you're waiting months for money, and if you don't understand how much a poor cashflow position costs you, it's a huge business cost that you don't really compute."

This is the gap between the income statement and the balance sheet. Revenue booked is not cash in hand, and a young company that confuses the two orders materials for next month's big job and goes cash negative while technically sitting in the green. Retail closes that gap.

"Here's how much it is. You wanna do it? Yes. Okay, we'll do it next week. We're done. And then they pay you."

Eric stacks supplier terms on top, paying for materials on a credit card to pull cash in faster and push payments out further. He calls the effect on his cashflow position magic. The relationship is also cleaner, because a four-month claim process exhausts a homeowner no matter how good the work is, while a retail job ends while everyone is still happy.

Win on the basics: pay your crews on Friday

Eric has worked with the same crews for 20 years, and that equity is what let him drag them up into harder mountain work they initially resisted. The thing that builds that kind of loyalty is almost embarrassingly simple.

"It's crazy in roofing, like what a hack it is to just pay your crews on time. Some lunch, some water bottle, and pay them every Friday. And just kinda common sense things you would think. It really, really goes a long way, and it's crazy how many still just don't do that."

Relationships are what open hard jobs on both sides of the supply chain. Tyler spent 13 years at ABC Supply, so when PAK asks a supplier to do something tough for a remote mountain build, they have the standing to get a yes. The mountains punish anyone who is sloppy on the fundamentals, because every part of the job is already a little harder than it would be in town.

Build the company to sell, even if you never sell it

Eric is 41, and PAK is a legacy project for him in a way his first company never was. He grew up low income, so the first time around the goal was money, and once he had it, the work stopped being fulfilling. This time the metric is different. He told me he wants to build a company people want to work for, and he means it to the point of cheering when good people get recruited away.

The strategic frame he keeps coming back to is one I think every founder should steal.

"When you build a company, build it to sell it. Not to say you're gonna sell it, but if you're building something that private equity or even just someone who wants to buy a business is attracted to, you probably have something that you don't wanna sell."

The logic is that buyability and quality are the same thing.

"The more you're not involved, the more valuable that company is for someone to buy it."

A company doing 25 or 30 million that runs without the founder in every project is exactly the company nobody wants to part with, which is why someone will always want to buy it. PAK has pro formas mapped through 2031, but Eric is staying fluid and building it piece by piece.

When I floated a mentor's line that sanity is the most underrated metric in business, Eric did not hesitate.

"First one, I wanted the money. This one, I want the sanity, the peace of mind. The time, you know?"

What other storm-market contractors should take from Eric's playbook

If you run a roofing or exterior business in a market where hail can bail you out, here is what to copy from PAK.

• Forecast as if the storm never comes. Build your pro forma on retail only. Treat any storm revenue as a bonus you choose to take, not the foundation you stand on, so a good hail year never rewrites your identity.
• Go where the work is hard. Complexity and bad logistics are a moat. Pick the jobs, regions, or product mixes that scare off 90 percent of your competition, and let the difficulty thin the field for you.
• Run cashflow as the real scoreboard. Get paid fast, negotiate supplier terms, and never confuse booked revenue with cash in hand. Then protect the people who make it possible by paying crews on time, every time.

Hear the full conversation

Eric and I covered a lot more than fits here, from his first company's 27 sales project managers to why he briefly went to brew school in Denver. Watch the full episode on YouTube, and if you want to see what we are building to help contractors like PAK run a tighter operation, book a Nail demo .

Article by George Paladichuk, founder of Nail AI. Featuring Eric Smith, co-founder of PAK Exteriors in Englewood, Colorado.